Our Impact

Achieving Impact

Crop Composition Database

Improving Knowledge of Human Nutrition Globally

Our Crop Composition Database, which contains over 1.5 million data points on 17 crops, is used to inform the development of diets that promote the healthy growth of livestock and improve global data sets related to food security and nutrition modeling. The database contains 27 years of data from 17 countries.

7,161

total users in 122 countries

in 2023

South Asia Biosafety Program

Strengthening Institutional Governance of Biotechnology in India and Bangladesh

For more than 15 years, our South Asia Biosafety Program (SABP) has worked to assist India and Bangladesh to facilitate the implementation of transparent, efficient, and responsive regulatory frameworks for products of modern biotechnology.

21,000

subscribers to the SABP newsletter

Helped develop 3 key documents that improve the transparency of risk assessment of agricultural biotechnology in India.

Developed an e-learning program for the Government of India to help raise awareness about their environmental risk assessment guidelines.

20 Institutional Biosafety Officers in India were trained to develop resources for a functioning institutional biosafety program.

16 research projects that serve as a baseline to inform environmental risk assessment of GE plants in Pakistan were funded.

A book was published by the SAARC Agriculture Center with consensus recommendations on the regulation of biosafety in South Asia.

Food and Feed Safety Training

Educating People About Food Safety and Biosafety

AFSI’s online courses deliver training to support our capacity-building efforts in an accessible, interactive format. They are offered free of charge to participants of our workshops and training activities, as well as regulatory agencies, academics, the private sector, and other interested stakeholders.

100%

of participants Agree that the course has improved their knowledge of the subject.

GEnZ Explorer

Promoting Use of Relevant Field Trial Data across Geographies

AFSI produced the Global Environmental Zones (GEnZ) Explorer, an easy-to-use online tool that allows users to visualize agroclimate zonations and their relationships to confined field trial (CFT) locations. The tool can identify environments that are important for cultivation of 20 crops to help determine where to best locate CFTs and maximize data utility.

AFSI published a conceptual framework for data transportability in the journal Transgenic Research in 2014.

Gene Drives in Mosquitoes

Shedding Light on Mosquito Vector Biology

Understanding vector biology is an important component of any disease management strategy. It will be essential for assessing potential environmental risks that may be associated with the deployment of genetically engineered mosquitos. The Agriculture & Food Systems Institute has worked to advance understanding of this issue.

In 2018, AFSI and others served as lead authors of the OECD’s first biology document for an insect species, Aedes aegypti.

With the success of the first effort, AFSI is co-leading the drafting of a second mosquito biology document, describing Anopheles gambiae.

In 2019, NEPAD, with the support of AFSI and FNIH, wrote an article summarizing outcomes of four regional consultations, published in Malaria Journal.

In 2020, "Genetic Biocontrol for Invasive Species" was published in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology.

WNDDS

Assessing the Nutritional Properties of Food

Our World Nutrient Databases for Dietary Studies (WNDDS) provides easy access to Food Composition Databases and Tables. These data have many uses including evaluating nutritional variation of plants and foods, analyzing relationships between nutrient intake and disease, and establishing dietary guidelines.

databases and tables from 92 countries

nutrients and 24 food classifications